Parts of the article have been updated after Steven Zhao update at the end. Since Steven Zhao is the only one contact person at Shenzhen Xunlong Software, the maker of Orange Pi boards, and the company appears to be focusing on hardware development more than on software and documentation, so at one point in time, people were speculating that it could be one person operation 🙂 Last year, Steven told us there were over 10 persons working in the office. But hey, photos, or it’s fake! We now have a definite proof as Renaud Coustellier visited Steven Zhao in his Shenzhen Offices, and published a report on Minimachines (in French). I’ll provide a summary below, but visit Minimachines website, if you want the full story and more pictures. First, Shenzhen Xunlong rented a floor, or part of it, in one of the many Shenzhen office buildings, and engineers are working in the typical cubicles, you’ll find in most other companies …

Orange Pi 2G-IoT is a low cost ARM Linux board with 2G, and WiFi & Bluetooth connectivity, basically with the guts of a smartphone minus the display and battery. Shenzhen Xunlong has now released a 800×480 display with capacitive touch support for the board available in black or white, and selling for $9.98 plus shipping. The board is too thick to make a smartphone out of it, but it reminds of the very expensive Qualcomm MDP’s (Mobile Development Platform), so Android app developers may find some use to test their apps on lower end hardware. It could also be used for control panels that do not need to be very thin. Orange Pi 2G-IoT display specifications: 3.5″ TFT Display with 800×480 resolution Capacitive touchscreen Case with the Back, Home, and Recent buttons Dimensions – With case: 57.14 x 96.85 x 2.0 mm; Display only: 51.84 x 86.4mm Software support is a mystery, and while I’m pretty sure it will work …

The maker of Orange Pi boards, Shenzhen Xunlong Software, has partnered with Canonical to launch Orange Pi app store, allowing developers to gain a simple mechanism to share their applications, projects and scripts with the Orange Pi community. The store relies on snaps instead of deb packages, with snaps allowing a secure distributions of apps bundled with all their dependencies, which according to Canonical can decreased the time for an half an hour installation process to just a few seconds. The community has already contributed hundreds of snaps in the Ubuntu snap store, including openHAB for home automation, Rocket.chat self-hosted chat platform, NextCloud for cloud storage, and wifi-ap for networking. You can get them from the App store, but installing a snap from the command line is easy, for example: However, I cannot find any Ubuntu Core image for Orange Pi Boards yet on Ubuntu Core Getting Started page. It would also work on other operating systems like Arch Linux …

Orange Pi Zero is a $7 and up board based on Allwinner H2+ quad core Cortex A7 processor with 256 to 512MB RAM, Ethernet, WiFi, and USB, but no video output except on headers, making it more suitable to headless applications. The company has just launched Orange Pi Zero NAS Expansion port adding SATA, mSATA, two more USB ports, and an AV port allowing you to add a hard drive or SSD, and connect it to a TV with composite input. Orange Pi Zero NAS Expansion Board preliminary specifications: Storage – 1x SATA port, 1x mSATA port both through a JMS578 USB 3.1 to SATA bridge with UAS support each, which should be better than some other USB to SATA solution despite only being connected to a USB 2.0 interface. USB – 2x USB 2.0 ports Video & Audio Output – 3.5mm AV jack with composite video (TBC) and stereo audio Misc – Microphone and IR receiver Header – 13-pin …